WHAT’S it like to swim the English Channel? A Poole doctor who only started open water swimming last year will find out this summer.

Dr Annie Maggs, of Sherwood Avenue, will join a team of six raising money for the Aspire charity, which helps those with spinal cord injuries. She decided to take up the challenge during a year off following her foundation training.

“I wanted to do a personal challenge during this year and I got the idea after joining East Dorset Open Water Swimming Club,” she said. “Every week it seemed that someone had done a big event like swimming the channel so I thought I’d try that first of all as part of a relay.”

President Calvin Coolidge gave her the nickname “America’s Best Girl” after she swam across the English Channel in 1926. In her day, Gertrude Ederle captured the public’s imagination in the same way as other athletic and patriotic heroes like slugger Babe Ruth and aviator Charles A. Lindbergh. She was overwhelmed when an estimated 2 million people showed up in the financial district for a ticker-tape parade on August 27 celebrating her accomplishment, chanting “Trudy! Trudy!” (Never mind that her family actually called her “Gertie.”) She sustained a career as a minor celebrity for about a decade before retreating into a quiet life of teaching deaf children how to swim.

The Grimsby Telegraph published film footage of the 1951 Daily Mail race across the English Channel.

The race was won by Mareeh Hassan Hamad of Egypt in 12 hours 12 minutes over France's Roger Le Morvan who finished in 12 hours 13 minutes. Footage of the race shows some very different conditions of channel swimming in the 1950's compared to contemporary times across the Channel.

The Grimsby trawler's daughter not only swam the English Channel in 1951 but also smashed the time set a year earlier by another female swimmer

In August 1951, Brenda Fisher swam the English Channel - breaking the women's world record time for the tremendous endeavour.

The 23-year-old daughter of a Grimsby trawler skipper, completed the distance between France and England in a new record women's time of 12 hours 42 minutes; breaking the previous women's record of 13 hours 20 minutes, set by Florence Chadwick in 1950.

"Philip Hodges published an incredible chart of the marathon swims accomplished over 100 days by the 2017 Cork Distance Week swimmers," reported founder and instigator Ned Denison.

One of the swimmers tells his own tale:, “I’d done my single warm water lake marathon, followed my dream, signed up for the English Channel in 2018, put in a hard winter of pool training and shivered through some spring cold water dips. The trip to Ireland was from home to a larger airport, then over the Atlantic to London then on the Cork. I arrived late the night before the start of the Cork Distance Week and met my roommates, one veteran from three previous years and two other newbies.

Pat Gallant-Charette is living proof that we don’t need to put time constraints on our dreams. The 66-year-old grandmother of three from Westbrook, Maine became the oldest woman to ever swim across the English Channel in June when she made the 21-mile-turned-34-mile crossing (because of the strong current) in 18 hours.

Last week, Jean Pierre, the Manager from Amsterdam Meet Berlage contacted me about a great story inside his location. He was inspired by Loes le Blanc, 45, mother of 3, swimming the English Channel in a team of 4, to raise awareness about the Free a Girlproject. With such a great story we couldn’t miss knowing a bit more and share it with you.